November 2003

The Brain Injury Association of Arkansas’

Our Annual General Membership Meeting will be held in Little Rock on Saturday, December 6, 2003 at 10:00 A.M. in the Reddy Room at the Entergy Arkansas Building, 900 South Louisiana. The 3-story building, located at 9^th & Louisiana, has the Entergy red/white ball above the building. Enter on the south side of the building.

This is our annual meeting for members where the Board reports on the activities of the past year. This is also when Board members are reelected and new Board members elected.

Individuals interested in serving on the Board should send a resume and what they would bring to the Board to either our mailing address on the back or our email address. This information should be sent as soon as possible but no later than November 15^th.

All members in good standing are eligible to serve on the Board and vote at the meeting. To be a "member in good standing" your dues must have been paid within the 12 months prior to the meeting. The date your dues were last paid is on your address label.

Our 15^th annual conference is behind us. It went well. We had excellent presenters and a receptive audience. Overall feedback was good. Our "Thanks" to all of our presenters and to our exhibitors. Exhibitors at our conference were:

• Disability Right Center
• St. Vincent Rehabilitation/HealthSouth Rehabilitation
• Central Arkansas Hospital Rehabilitation Unit, Searcy
• St. Vincent Memory Center
• Baptist Health Rehabilitation Institute
• Center for Comprehensive Services, Carbondale, IL
• PDB Enterprises, Inc
• Snell Prosthetic & Orthotics Laboratory
• Timber Ridge Ranch
• RehabCare Group

If you need any information about any of our exhibitors, give us a call and we’ll get you the information you need.

We have already started working on next years’ conference. We are already looking at tentative dates for our 16^th annual conference and a place. We are considering either October 7-8 or October 14-15. We will start our search for presenters and topics in the very near future. If you have a suggestion, let us know.

"The workbook provides activities for individuals with brain injury to assist recovery of their thinking skills. Each activity provides a group of tasks listed by their level of difficulty. The tasks range from the lease challenging (Level 1) to higher levels that are progressively more challenging. You can select activities that you believe are appropriate and increase the level of difficulty by selecting appropriate tasks as progress warrants."

The program was developed by Tom Novack, PhD and Jacqueline Blankenship, MCD, CCC-SLP. It consists of 48 activities, grouped into six skill groups. Each activity has several levels of increasing complexity. The skill groups are:

Fine-motor control,
Attention/Concentration,
Memory-Orientation,
Reasoning /Problem Solving,
Visual Spatial &
Language

"The University of Alabama at Birmingham Traumatic Brain Injury Model System is an excellent community resource for educational materials on brain injury. All materials are available on the Internet at www.uab.edu/tbi, by phone at 205-934-3283, or request through mail at Research Services, 619 19^th Street South – SRC 529, Birmingham, AL 35249-7330."

Our Thanks to the Alabama Head Injury Foundation for this information. Most of this article came from their Volume 1, 2003 issue of "Brain Waves."

As we hear of other conferences in our area that are brain injury related, we like to pass on that information. Here are two that may be of interest to some of you.

• Friday, November 14, in Memphis, TN. "No Simple Solutions – Behavior Problems and Psychosocial Issues After Brain Injury." Presented by Traumatic Brain Injury Services, Department of Neurosurgery, Regional Medical Center. For more information, call 901-545-7100.

• Friday, November 21, in Little Rock, AR. "Brain Injury: Spanning the Continuum of Care." Sponsored by Baptist Health Rehabilitation Institute, Baptist Health Medical Center & Timber Ridge Ranch Neurorehabilitation Center. For more information, call 501-227-8478 or toll free 1-888-BAPTIST.

If you are a member of the Brain Injury Association of Arkansas, your address label shows when you last paid membership dues and a message if your "Dues are due." We try to send out a reminder the month before a member's dues expire. Like any organization, we need members. Member's dues help fund the organization by helping pay for newsletters and other efforts. In our organization, members are there to help others and provide points of contact in special situations. If you are not already a member, we hope you will consider becoming a member. We have several levels of membership available. To become a member or renew your membership, complete the following and return with your payment to our PO Box listed on the back page.

Mary Anne Sullivan – President – SullivanMaryAnne@uams.edu
Rene Boucher – Vice President – rehabrene@hotmail.com
Dana Gonzales – Secretary – healthpolicy@msn.com
Gary Low – Treasurer – gary@glowar.com

Web Site: www.brainassociation.org 

501-374-3585 (Little Rock)
800-235-2443 In-state only

11/05/03